Sixty Wreaths on the Hill

She is eighty-one and still drives herself to church. She set a grocery sack on the counter and said, “Dwain stopped by. He said you might be short of ribbon.”

Then she took off her coat and hung it on the hook like she lived here.

In the sack were eleven rolls of red velvet ribbon, some new and some faded, every one of them out of her own Christmas closet. She did not ask me a single question.

She just sat down at my table and started cutting bows. Word gets around in the country, and it does not need a telephone to do it.

Verlie tied bows the way her mother taught her, with a double loop and the tails cut on a slant so they would not fray. Her old hands never stopped moving.

Bernadine watched her for five minutes without saying a word. Then she tied one herself, and it was very nearly as good, and Verlie said, “Well, look at that,” and Bernadine turned pink.

We ate tomato soup and crackers at one end of the table while the other end kept working.

I had the radio on low, and Verlie hummed along to the hymns without looking up from her ribbon.

When they played “Silent Night,” Kenna hummed along with her, very soft. I don’t think either one of them noticed the other was doing it.

At two o’clock we had thirty-four. Noble said so. My hands were cramping from the cold every time I went out on the porch for another armload of cedar.

I will tell you the truth. Somewhere around wreath forty, I had to go stand in the pantry for a minute with the door pulled to behind me.

Not because I was tired, though I was. Because I was thinking about Kaylee’s face when she shrugged, and something hard was coming up in my chest that I did not like.

I prayed a little in there, among the canned beans and the jars of pickles.

Nothing fancy. I asked the Lord to take that hard thing out before it got any bigger.

I had four grandchildren at that table, and two of them were hers. I did not want to walk out of that pantry as a woman who would teach them to hate their own mother.

When I came out, Kenna was standing right by the pantry door. She was holding a finished bundle of cedar in both hands like a little offering.

She looked up at me with those dark eyes and said, “Grandma, are you sad about the old ones?” I don’t know how long she had been standing there.

“A little,” I said. “But look how many we have now.” She nodded and went back to her sorting, and I saw her sneak a long look at the stack by the door.

Dwain came in at three with his cheeks burnt red from the wind. He washed up at the sink and stood at the end of the table and picked up a wire paddle without a word.

He is a big man with big hands, and his wreaths came out lopsided, and I did not say so.

Nobody did. Verlie tied bows on his just as careful as she did on mine.

Noble’s wreath was the most lopsided of all. He had begged to make one by himself, start to finish, and I let him. It took him almost an hour.

He worked with his tongue between his teeth and his whole face scrunched up.

The bundles went every which way. One side was fat and the other side was thin.